Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes
-
Console yourself by remembering that the world doesn't deserve your affection.
-
Men are the devils of the earth, and the animals are its tormented souls.
-
Memory works like the collection glass in the Camera obscura: it gathers everything together and therewith produces a far more beautiful picture than was present originally.
-
Only a male intellect clouded by the sexual drive could call the stunted, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped and short-legged sex the fair sex.
-
We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness.
-
That which knows all things and is known by none is the subject.
-
The man who goes up in a balloon does not feel as if he were ascending; he only sees the earth sinking deeper below him.
-
Every human perfection is linked to an error which it threatens to turn into.
-
If at times I have thought myself unfortunate, it is because of a confusion, an error. I have mistaken myself for someone else... Who am I really? I am the author of The World as Will and Representation, I am the one who has given an answer to the mystery of Being that will occupy the thinkers of future centuries. That is what I am, and who can dispute it in the years of life that still remain for me?
-
The little incidents and accidents of every day fill us with emotion, anxiety, annoyance, passion, as long as they are close to us, when they appear so big, so important, so serious; but as soon as they are borne down the restless stream of time they lose what significance they had; we think no more of them and soon forget them altogether. They were big only because they were near.
-
The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public. A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.
-
Our first ideas of life are generally taken from fiction rather than fact.
-
To conceal a want of real ideas, many make for themselves an imposing apparatus of long compound words, intricate flourishes and phrases, new and unheard-of expressions, all of which together furnish an extremely difficult jargon that sounds very learned. Yet with all this they say-precisely nothing.
-
Want and boredom are indeed the twin poles of human life.
-
What makes people hard-hearted is this, that each man has, or fancies he has, as much as he can bear in his own troubles.
-
A man may call to mind the face of his friend, but not his own. Here, then, is an initial difficulty in the way of applying the maxim, Know Thyself.
-
... that when you're buying books, you're optimistically thinking you're buying the time to read them.
-
Ordinary people merely think how they shall 'spend' their time; a man of talent tries to 'use' it.
-
In our early youth we sit before the life that lies ahead of us like children sitting before the curtain in a theatre, in happy and tense anticipation of whatever is going to appear. Luckily we do not know what really will appear.
-
Every hero is a Samson. The strong man succumbs to the intrigues of the weak and the many; and if in the end he loses all patience he crushes both them and himself.
-
It is difficult to keep quiet if you have nothing to do.
-
Just as one spoils the stomach by overfeeding and thereby impairs the whole body, so can one overload and choke the mind by giving it too much nourishment. For the more one reads the fewer are the traces left of what one has read; the mind is like a tablet that has been written over and over. Hence it is impossible to reflect; and it is only by reflection that one can assimilate what one has read. If one reads straight ahead without pondering over it later, what has been read does not take root, but is for the most part lost.
-
A sense of humour is the only divine quality of man.
-
Meistens belehrt uns erst der Verlust über den Wert der Dinge.